Women lawmakers angered by veto of Ledbetter Act

Angered by Gov. Rick Perry’s veto of the Texas version of the “Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act,” the legislation’s female sponsors Friday accused the governor of retreating on women’s rights.

“I’m disappointed and I am really heartbroken,” said Rep. Senfronia Thompson, D-Houston, who authored the bill that would have given women the opportunity to file an equal-pay lawsuit in state court. “It is amazing that in 2013, women are still fighting for rights enjoyed by males.”

The legislation’s Senate sponsor, Sen. Wendy Davis, D-Fort Worth, said the bill would have permitted women access to Texas courts for wage discrimination claims under a liberalized time frame. That Perry vetoed what she called “a no-brainer” proves the governor is intent on “eroding women’s rights in the state of Texas.”

Coupled with Perry’s special session agenda, which includes bills imposing restrictions on how and when abortions are performed, Davis said Perry is engaged in “an effort to put women back in their place.”

Davis noted that women protesting the abortion bills appeared at a Senate committee hearing Thursday night dressed in 1950s fashions. “It is symbolic of what is happening in Texas.”

Forty-two other states have passed the Lilly Ledbetter Act, which resets the time period in which a person can file a wage discrimination claim every time that person receives a discriminatory paycheck. Without this law in place, a complainant only has 180 days from the time the first discriminatory paycheck is issued, Davis said during legislative debate. As she pointed out, many businesses prohibit disclosure of salary information, making it impossible for a woman to detect a discriminatory wage.

The Texas Association of Business and the National Federation of Independent Business both opposed the bill. Cathy DeWitt, TAB’s vice-president for governmental affairs, said that the legislation allowed a woman to recover damages from an employer even if a wage gap was “unintentional.”

“That would be very problematic for employers and we thought it would be more harmful than helpful,” said DeWitt.

In a letter to Perry seeking the veto, TAB president Bill Hammond wrote that the 180-day limit on lawsuits “protects employers from the burden of defending claims arising from employment decisions that are long past.” Although wage decisions may have been made many years earlier, Hammond wrote, the Lilly Ledbetter Act would “allows a shift of allege discriminatory intent from a long ago decision…to a later act – the issuance of a paycheck –that comes without any discriminatory intent.”

Significant passage of time since the initial salary decision was made would affect “the reliability of evidence” in a wage discrimination claim, Hammond said.